A perfect blend of Intelligence and Stupidity

1. Name images correctly: Be it on Blogger or WordPress platform, the most important part of the image SEO is the naming. We usually process and upload mobile, camera or web images directly to our blog without caring about how it is named. Make sure that the image includes targeted keywords with _ or – separating words. The image format is not a problem, but it seems that .JPG is widely preferred. An image with the proper name will get more preference from search engines than a RAW image.

2. Fill ALT and Captions: Alt tag means alternative tags. These tags are used by search engines to recognize images. A simple implementation of an ALT tab is given below.

Here the text filed between alt=”” gives a rough idea of the image to the search engines and they will position it accordingly. Moreover, people using a text-only browser or a screen reader can easily understand the image details by reading these tags. If you are on Google Blogger platform, you have to add ALT tags manually after uploading images. It can be done from the the HTML editor after uploading the image. In WordPress you have options to add ALT tags right from the image uploader.

3. Position the image inside or nearer to an article formatted within the SEO rules.

4. Link to the image with anchor text as the required keyword.

6. In WordPress, check your robots.txt file and make sure that your images are allowed to get indexed. If you are using Blogger, there is another step to make your images SEO friendly and available in the search engines. Many of the bloggers suing blogspot.com doesn’t know that their images are automatically uploaded to Google Picasa. Usually these images are private and held as unlisted. To make them public, go to any album on Picasa> Edit> album properties> Now select public and save. You can label each image in the album section for more search engine visibility.

7. Edit and crop images to avoid duplicates: The search engines are now powerful than it was before. Google Image Search has several options that let you choose images based on color, type and other factors. Also there are some services like Google Goggles that let you search the web by taking a photo of an object. So that means, Google knows the properties of all existing images in its search index. So when you’re copying an image from Google search, crop it and add text and other details to make it stand-out from other copies.

The above given are some of the best on-page image SEO techniques to get better rankings. However, the actual position of the images in search may vary depending upon the incoming links to page, website quality, Home page PageRank and many other factors. You can build external links by bookmarking images to Digg, Reddit, Mixx and other similar services.

Wikileaks, that profound leaker of classified government documents, is pretty much just that: It’s a non-profit media organization that publishes documents submitted by anonymous sources and leaks. The website wikileaks.org was founded and launched in 2007 by Australian journalist and activist Julian Paul Assange.

Despite its reputation as a whistleblower, the site has earned a number of awards, including the 2008 Economist magazine New Media Award and Amnesty International’s UK Media Award for its work in 2008. Much of its work has been to outing human rights violations, political missteps, government censorship, details of war crimes, and government intelligence.

One common misconception about Wikileaks is that it is part of the Wikipedia empire. (In fact, even Turkey’s prime minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan made this mistake when questioning the legitimacy of the most recently leaked documents, noting that “the seriousness of Wikipedia is doubtful.”) A fundamental difference between the two, which the Wikipedia itself notes, is that unlike the open-editing credo of Wikipedia entries, once Wikileaks material cannot be altered by the public once published.

Twitter has been rolling out a new and improved version which offers “a faster, easier and richer way to discover what’s new in the world.” A lot of changes have been made and if you’re so accustomed to the old version, New Twitter may get you going, “WTF?” But it’s actually quite simple. Here are the key changes and improvements that you should know about:

1. New layout – The first thing you’re gonna notice is that the page is different. The right panel is significantly wider to squeeze a lot of things in there. Interestingly, the dimensions aren’t random. The Fibonacci spiral is actually used to determine the proportions of the page.

2. New toggling – The left panel, which used to only house the timeline, is improved for easy toggling between the original timeline, @mentions, retweets, searches and lists. It doesn’t display what platform (like Tweetdeck) you’re tweeting from, which was visible in old Twitter.

3. New streaming – Scrolling down to the bottom of the page will bring up older tweets. Before, you’ll have to click a “more” link to view back into the timeline. Twitter has adapted a Tumblr-like mechanism that will allow you to scroll down endlessly.

4. New context – Hovering over a tweet on your timeline will show an arrow. Clicking on it transforms your right panel into a details pane that includes replies to that tweet, retweets and @mentions. It will also give you a rundown of the person’s latest tweets.

5. New preview – Clicking on a friend’s name will being up a preview of their profile on the fight panel. It includes quick links to direct message, list and follow/unfollow. Their recent tweets are also previewed.

6. New replies – Replies will now include all the @mentions in the original tweet. For example, if you’ll be replying to a tweet by @FriendOne that mentioned @FriendTwo in it, your reply template will appear as “@FriendOne @FriendTwo [space for reply].” This will not be on the “What’s happening?” field at the top of the timeline. Instead, a popup box will appear when you click on “Reply.” The original tweet will be visible at the bottom of the box for reference.

7. New “What’s happening?” – You can still tweet using the “What’s happening?” field. But if you click on that little square at the upper right side of the page, a popup box will be brought up. Making an @mention is easier because the field now haves an auto-complete feature, which means you can never get the name of the friend you’re gonna mention wrong.

8. New media – Clicking on a tweet with a picture link will allow you to view the picture on the right column alongside the tweet. You don’t have to click on the link anymore like before and be directed to an external Web page. This is available for videos as well.

9. New profile – You now have a bigger avatar and your bio details and Web site are moved from the right to the left. Your personal timeline features your avatar in every tweet, like the homepage timeline.

10. New messages – The DM page is streamlined to look more like an inbox. People you’ve DM-ed with are organized on the left panel. Clicking on one of them will open a timeline of your exchanges of messages on the right panel. Creating a new message brings up a popup box with auto-complete features on the “To” field.

I do not think any one of us new to the term social networks , how many social networks out there ? . And I am sure you belong to at least one of them. When I say social networks there are different kind of networks. Some of them are profession networks such as LinkedIn , and some of them are network for fun (facebook) , some of them to share images (flicker). Not only that number of social networks are going up very rapidly. Others are MySpace , the old school Friendster and latest craze Twitter .

If we look at those social networks , different network gather different data from us. If we look at the professional networks they will collect data like places where you have worked , type of the work you have done. On the other hand if you look at fun type of networks , it collects data like what do you like to do at the leisure time , what places you would like to visit and etc… , at the end of the day all those networks collect so much of personal data from you. With knowing or not knowing , we let those applications to collect and share our data. I agree that I am also a member of a number of networks.

Here are the list of problem associate with having those personal data for public usage.

First thing is you start to receive a number of unwanted or what we call as junk mail , because someone can find your name and email from those networks and then find the areas your are interested in and then send emails. And we all know what happen when your email address goes public.

Second , from those social networks one can find your friends. And then someone can send emails or photo links as your friends sending to you [A good example is tagging and commenting in facebook]. When you see a mail from your friend saying look at this nice picture , you are most likely to click that link. Then it might take you to bad site and ask your to login to the applications which is similar to the that of your social network home page. Then they can collect your user name and password. This is very risky because most of the people use same user name and password for various places.

Third , say you have a friend call “Foo” in facebook , then that person is not there in your professional network. Now what happen is someone (not Foo) can send an invitation asking adding you as a friend in your professional networks. Since the name is familiar to you , without checking too much you will allow to add that person to your network. Once you allow , he can send request to some other friend of you , then that person will also allow , because he is already a friend of yours. This is often happen in entertaining network like facebook.

I am sure there are enough information out there in various social networks , where someone can collect those information and do online transactions or login into your bank accounts. In my view I think social network help a lot for phishing attacks as well.

One thing to remember is yes , social networks are good and fun as well as help a lot. But there is bad site of that, we need to know what kind of data we allow to share. Specially , when you provide your personal information like birthday , address , phone numbers think twice and provide.

In the United States, a new law proposal called The Combating Online Infringement and Counterfeits Act (COICA) was introduced last week, and there will be a hearing in front of the Judiciary Committee this Thursday.

If passed, this law will allow the government, under the command of the media companies, to censor the internet as they see fit, like China and Iran do, with the difference that the sites they decide to censor will be completely removed from the internet and not just in the US.

Please see the following article from the Huffington Post for more information.

TechCrunch.com posted a list of 370 passwords that Twitter bans its members from using when they sign up for new accounts. They range from the obvious — “password,” “twitter,” etc. — to the obscene and bizarre.

Why ban them? They’re very easy for humans and brute-force hacking scripts to figure out, making it easier for people to get access to your account. On Twitter, this can be embarrassing. On other sites, this can be very costly.

A good, strong password is long, has multiple numbers and letters, mixes upper and lower case, and includes special characters like ! or &. Different sites use different security techniques, and might not allow some characters. But in general, the harder to remember, the better! [Tech Crunch]